Summary
The player takes the roll of a treasure hunter and you find a fallen ship in the desert. There are a lot of treasures to find in the shape of weapons.
Will you take on the challenge to find the treasures that might lie inside the fallen ship?
Specification:
Group - Studio Smithereen
School project: Nine weeks at 50%
Level editor - Unity 3D
Engine - In-house
My contrubutions:
Paper planning
White boxing
3D model placement
Mission design
LUA scripting
Tools:
Unity 3D
Atom
In-house engine
Work:
After setting our setting for the game we thought that the best way to approach this project was to as fast as possible set up the correct scale and some rooms to run around inside,
We worked on control settings and core mechanics for the Programmers, the Artists worked on models for Characters and weapons, we where inspired by Bungie's latest game 'Destiny',
we liked the feeling of the gameplay and both environment as well as weapons felt really good.
On the level designer part we splitted the work, one worked on the making of placeholder models for all type of environment we wanted for our rooms, not any small objects, the focus
was on big and useful models, the other one started making levels inside Unity after quickly sketching our the ideas in a top-down version. When the first walls , ceilings and floor
pieces were done we both started on working hard on making the levels playable as fast as possible.
It took us about a week getting our first levels up, but we did not have any scripting inside the project yet so transporting the player in between the levels was not possible in this
phase, we instead worked on new placeholders, learned how physicX worked in Maya, so that we could make the models that we wanted to move around as physic objects inside our game.
No disciplin never anything to do, there was always something that could be fixed up or iterated, The first layout for the first level of the game were almost totally flat except for
the stairs that made the map more vertical in it's gameplay, I took feedback on how to improve first from our Artists, with the feedback from them I used their feedback and my own
style to make the rooms more interesting and challenging.
In the end of the project we had problem with time, we did not have the time to make scripts for a spawning system for our enemies, we took the question to our programmers and met half
way by placing enemies throughout the level but instead of having a round ball around every enemy for them to act if one enemy was shot at they instead now raycast to each other and
if a wall or object was hit the enemy was not called upon and that fixed our issue with enemies started shooting at the player while standing behind the walls or below the player in another room.
We really wanted a spawning system because that would have made our game more intense, but we said that we would settle for the game to at least be exciting and we will later improve the game
by adding the spawn areas for enemies. A thing we got feedback on and I personally were happy about was the tutorial, our Artist gave us just the pictures and when I looked at the pictures
and the level I was at first scared on how I would add the pictures without pulling the player out of the game or at least have it somewhat believeable.
I then remembered that we the last week made a new shader for our godrays in the game, I scaled the pictures to fit the whole corridor and then I changed the shader to the same shader we used
for our godrays, this worked like a charm as the tutorial window naturally faded when the player was getting closer to it, also the pictures are planes so they are one sided, when a player
passed the tutorial window and looked back the window was gone.